


Make ourselves an idol to bow before

by heavenisalibrary



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:56:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to know what he looks like in nothing but his socks, wants to be able to picture it the next time she watches him dismantle and army with some clever words — she wants to pull the mighty man before her apart until he’s smaller, more digestible, something she can place in the palm of her hand or tuck in her pocket or sum up in a sentence, or better, a word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make ourselves an idol to bow before

**Author's Note:**

> Total PWP. For Emma who asked for classroom porn and Amie who wanted a Luna University River.

River finds existing as normal extremely trying. When she was Mels, she’d still been inextricably wrapped up in the Silence and their various plots and plans, and so she’d not really had to try and pretend at all; she’d been Amy’s troubled, slightly eccentric friend with sticky fingers and a bad temper. During that time, she was allowed to be an oddity. In fact, she’d tried to be an oddity. In retrospect, River realized that her total inability to be in any way subtle was not, in fact, the result of shoddy criminality or poor planning, but a desire to be caught. If Mels had wanted to get away with murder, she could’ve done. She was arrested because she wanted her parents to scold her, because only in those moments did she feel normal. Now, she was to live a normal life, at least until the end of her degree, and she couldn’t quite convince herself to fit in.

 

She knew a lot more than her peers, and she learned a lot more quickly. Study groups were impossible because she quickly got frustrated with how little others retained. River could read a hefty textbook in little more than an hour and quote it verbatim; her classmates had trouble getting through academic papers and riddling the point, let alone specific examples. River saw everything in ticks of a clock. When she thought about concepts and people and events, they sprawled in a perfectly clear timeline before her, and sometimes she even felt as though she could see things beyond the bend of the present. Her classmates had trouble remembering when events of historical significance occurred. All in all, River found human life to be an exercise in restraint. Not stealing cars, not pickpocketing the girl with the nasal voice from one of her classes, not stabbing the particularly dense young man in the flat next door in the throat when he winked at her.

 

River barely has a handle on any of it when he appears, and makes things infinitely more difficult. She’d known, of course, that she’d see him again; he’d said so, and occasionally he shows up to take her to tea or to visit the historical event she’s writing a paper on, but his visits are few and far between. He said she needed time, and she doesn’t disagree, so she’s content for him to come and go as he pleases — that’s not her problem. The problem is that he’s standing at the front of her Ancient Religions class in that ridiculous bowtie and scrawling Professor The Doctor on the chalkboard in his ridiculous handwriting. When he turns around and claps his hand together, his eyes immediately find hers, and he beams. Her mouth hangs open, and she tries to resist the urge to throw something quite heavy at his head, or drag him out of the room. What on earth — !?

 

“Right! As you can see, I’m your professor for the day, as yours has taken ill,” the Doctor says, then pauses, gesturing broadly and shaking his head, “well, less ill and more kidnapped by a complicated intergalactic sort-of mafia group bent on destroying the shopping mall down the road — don’t know why, haven’t figured it out yet — so... yeah! I’m your professor. You can call me the Doctor.”

 

“I’m sorry,” calls one student from the back of the room, “are you a Doctor or a Professor?”

 

“Neither!” says the Doctor. “Or both, really. Bit of both. Best just call me the Doctor. But I am your professor.”

 

There’s a wave of muttering from the students, and River shifts in her seat, arching a brow at him. He meets her gaze and shrugs a bit, giving her an infuriating little grin before launching into a totally baffling lecture. Well, not so baffling for River — she’s able to follow him well enough, in part because she thinks nearly as quickly as he does, and in part because she’s used to his roundabout way of speaking and thinking. When he pauses after approximately a half hour of speaking non-stop, the silence is palpable.

 

“Any questions?” he says, totally unaware that no one has any idea of what he’s been talking about. Nobody but River, at any rate. She sits up in her seat.

 

“So the minotaurs would establish themselves as deities,” River says. The Doctor faces her, his eyes bright, and nods. “And they feed off of faith — so the more time passed, the more legendary they became, the more faith their subjects had in them, and the stronger they grew.” The Doctor nods again, stepping toward her.

 

“Right, exactly — in one case the minotaur withdrew completely into the mountains, and nobody saw it for years and years and years, and yet stories of it were passed on and passed on and passed on until it became this impossible god for these people; they were totally obsessed with it. And by the time the minotaur bothered to resurface, it had grown so bloated with their faith that it was just as large as they’d imagined.”

 

“It’s interesting. Almost paradoxical.”

 

“How so?”

 

“The minotaur hasn’t really any actual power to begin with, has it? It only becomes powerful after people believe it is. But once they believe it, it actually has power.”

 

“Well, yeah,” the Doctor says, beaming at her and rubbing his hands together. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

 

“Terrible, honestly.”

 

“Oh, yes, of course, horrible, really, I just meant...”

“I know what you meant, sweetie,” River says, rolling her eyes, the reaction totally reflexive. She hears her classmates shifting behind her, hears some whispers, and her face colors a bit in response. River isn’t given to embarrassment often, but she takes great pride in her mind and her work, and so calling her supposed professor ‘sweetie’ in front of the whole class strikes a particular chord. The feeling is quickly overtaken by the desire to slap the smirk off of the Doctor’s face when he notices her blush, though. “Is it hopeless, then?”

“What’s that?”

“Do these minotaurs ever get dethroned? Defeated?”

His face softens, and she realizes how closely he’s standing over her. She feels the eyes of her classmates on her, and knows she’ll have hell to pay for this discourse; it’s purely academic, but there’s nothing professional about the way she and the Doctor relate. It’s one of the things about him she finds both appealing and terrifying: he looks at her with such unguarded adoration and love that one would be hard-pressed to not see it.

“Of course you would ask that,” he says, reaching up to tweak his bowtie. “River Song, ever the champion of choosing one’s own fate, hm?”

She’s smiling stupidly up at him before she realizes it, her whole body humming.  It’s several moments before they both realize they’ve been staring at one another in silence, and River stirs when the girl next to her elbows her, and she starts. The Doctor blinks at her abrupt movement, pulling at his sleeves anxiously.

“Er, right, actually — actually, no. These minotaurs are rare beasts — well, minotaurs in general are a dime a dozen, really, but Minotaurs with a capital M and the ability to enslave entire planets with their mere presents are not common, so it’s not a frequent happening. But usually the society is consumed entirely. The Minotaurs are only ever felled by starvation, after their society collapses. Or, actually — what’s the date?”

River tells him.

“Still no, then,” he says.

“So someone will do.”

“That,” the Doctor says, “would be spoilers, my girl.”

He spins away from her to continue teaching the class, and she finds her attention rapt on him. On one hand, River would like to spend years simply speaking to the Doctor. He has so much knowledge in that stupid head of his — so many timelines and planets. So many things that have happened or never happened or might happen or will. There are inevibilities and ineffibilities wrapped up in his mind, and she wants to untangle them and explore them all, to pull her fingers along them like garland and take stock of every strand and every moment.

On the other hand, she wants to strip him of his goofy, professorial clothes and see him naked, to run her fingers along his travel-worn skin and press kisses to the quiet, intimate areas no one else gets to see. She wants to press herself to him until their bones collide, wants to map every freckle on his flesh, count his ribs, memorize the cadence of his heart; she wants to know that he belongs to her like she so belongs to him. She wants to know what he looks like in nothing but his socks, wants to be able to picture it the next time she watches him dismantle and army with some clever words — she wants to pull the mighty man before her apart until he’s smaller, more digestible, something she can place in the palm of her hand or tuck in her pocket or sum up in a sentence, or better, a word.

River watches him as he stalks back and forth across the room, watches the levity in his motions and the laughter in his eyes, watches the way his mouth forms his wonderful words. She loves the quickness with which his mind works; around him, she doesn’t feel so alien. Her admiration turns into an ache, turns into longing, and soon she loses track of his words altogether. Her mind catches on his lips as he speaks, on the graceful movements of his hands and his long, always-moving fingers. She shifts in her seat, crossing her legs and biting her lip as he leans against the desk. She imagines herself leaning against it with him behind her, imagines his long-fingered hands hot against the skin of her legs as he pushes her skirt up, imagines his gasp in her ear when he realizes she’s not wearing any knickers. She bites harder at her lip, blinking to clear her mind, only to find the Doctor staring keenly back at her. She releases her lip, running her tongue along it to soothe the ache she’s caused, and his eyes track the motion in a way that makes her burn.

River thinks about what the other students would think — star pupil River Song, know-it-all, aloof, bent over her professor’s desk, crying out into the empty classroom with an unlocked door, loving that someone could walk in at any time. She’s so wrapped up in the thought that she hardly notices the other students standing up to leave. She didn’t even hear him dismiss the class. Before she knows it, he’s leaning over her seat to kiss her forehead, and drawing her to stand before him.

“Fancy a bite?”

Instead of agreeing, she presses closer, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her body to his. “Only if that’s a euphemism.”

“It wasn’t,” the Doctor says, though she can see that his eyes have gone dark, and feels her fingers lightly brushing her sides. “Besides, I was saving dessert for after dinner.”

She lets out a bark of laughter. “That was awful.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, “I’ve said better. I’ve said worse. The point is, I think we should grab a some dinner and then —”

River cuts him off by pressing her lips to his, hard and hot and fast, tangling her fingers in his hair and moaning as he gasps into her mouth, clutching her tightly to him. Her erstwhile fantasies keyed her up enough that she felt about ready to vibrate out of her skin, and he’s hardly even touched her. His tongue presses past her lips, runs over the roof of her mouth in that way that makes her sigh, dragging her nails over his scalp and her other hand slipping under his blazer and shoving it off of his shoulders. He doesn’t protest at all until she begins to unbutton his shirt.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he says, wrapping his hands around her wrist and pulling back. She doesn’t let him withdraw completely, though, pressing her lips to the underside of his jaw and dragging her teeth lightly down his throat as he swallows heavily. “Not here, River — we’ve got to —”

“I’ve spent this entire class listen to you talk about — don’t try to deny it — archaeology, and as hot and bothered as you know that gets me I spent a good portion of your lecture imagining far better uses for that terribly talented tongue and if you think for a moment we’re going anywhere I’m going to shoot you.”

“You could not possibly be carrying a gun.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Do you want to test it?”

His eyes scan her face for a moment, and she leans forward again, rising to her tiptoes and running her tongue along his earlobe, nipping at the skin beneath it, and he’s quickly saying, “no, best not. River Song gets what she wants, no?”

“You’d best remember it, sweetie.”

He’s terribly pliant after that. He grabs her in fistfulls, pulling her shirt from her skirt and sliding his hands beneath, clawing at her back in a way that makes her whole body curl. She forces him back as they kiss hungrily to the desk. Finished unbuttoning his shirt, she goes for the button on his trousers as he slips his hand beneath her skirt to find her naked beneath, and the sound he makes low in his throat is positively obscene. She bites his lip as his hands tease her, fingers stroking her thighs but not going quite where she needs him until finally he slides a finger along her and she breaks away from his kiss, crying out.

“Did you really spend my lecture thinking about this?” he asks her, sliding a finger into her. She digs her hands into his bare shoulders before she shoves his shirt off altogether, clawing at his chest as he adds a second finger, his thumb pressing expertly to her clit as he pumps his hand in and out of her.

“Are you surprised?” she gasps, her voice hitching at the end as he twists his fingers just so. “You’re quite sexy when you’re impassioned. Mm, the things your voice does — and those hands — all I could do was picture them inside of me, imagine you bending me over the desk and — oh, god —”

“River,” he breathes against her ear, withdrawing his hand, and she nearly cries at the loss, gasping against his chest. Before she can complain, though, he’s turning her around to press her against the desk. She draws his hand up to lick his wet fingers, twining her tongue around the digits and watching him as he swallows, the wonderful grey of his eyes swallowed by his pupils as he looks at her. When she releases his hand he grabs the back of her head and kisses her hard, teeth and tongues, his slight stubble harsh against her skin; he thrusts his hips against her, hard enough that the desk gives way a bit, and as she goes to shove his trousers. There’s a bit of a pause as he shuffles out of them and strips the rest of his clothes, and then he’s on her once more, pulling her shirt from her and unsnapping her bra in one clever movement, and then he bends down to take a breast in his mouth, grazing the sensitive flesh with his teeth. He pulls back a bit and exhales, and the breath in combination with his saliva creates a sensation that makes her gasp. “You’ll do the same to me one day, you know.”

“What’s — what’s that?”

“Nevermind,” he says quickly, “spoilers.” She wonders if one day she won’t be a professor — if one day he won’t sit in and she’ll have her professor fantasy reversed; she thinks she’d like that. She thinks she likes him, any way she can have him. She reaches down to grab his cock, running her hand up and down the length as he sucks on the side of her neck. She traces a finger across the head and the wraps her fist around him, gripping him firmly and giving a tug that makes him jerk into her. She’s barely begun before she feels his hearts and breathing get a bit frantic, before he’s pulling away. She starts to sit back on the desk, more than ready to feel him inside of her when he suddenly grips her shoulders and spins her around, pinning her firmly against the desk. He brushes her hair to the side and runs his tongue in a line down her neck, placing a kiss at the top of her spin, his hands pushing her skirt down and letting her step out of it. “I recall something about bending you over my desk...”

“Oh, yes, sweetie, please.”

“Have you been a bad girl, Miss Song?” he says, laughing a bit against her skin, his erection pressing against her ass, and the whole thing is terribly obscene. She’s never been more turned on in her life, she thinks.

“Mm, Professor,” she murmurs back, and feels him smile against her skin. He places a gentle kiss to her shoulder, placating her slightly before he reaches a hand up to grip the back of her neck, just hard enough to make her toes curl, and forcing her to bend over the desk — not that she’d not have complied, but the fact that he’s so forceful makes her burn. His other hand reaches down to spread her legs a bit further, shifting slightly to line himself up with her entrance. He pauses before doing anything, breathing heavily against her back, and then without warning he pushes up into her and she nearly sobs at the sensation. His hand forces her down further until her breasts brush against the wood, and the begins to move. The position gives him the perfect angle to hit that spot inside of her that makes her keen into the empty classroom; the tight grip his hand has around her neck makes every sensation stronger, every nerve focused on the press of his fingers and the long, hard strokes of him inside of her.

“You love this, don’t you?” he asks against her ear, pausing to gasp at a particularly deep stroke. “You love knowing someone could walk in at any moment, that next time you go to see your classmates — because they’re certainly not your peers — you’ll know you’ve got marks from your professor beneath your clothes. You like playing with power, don’t you, dear?”

She loves his voice — and she loves him, though she resists the thought but in moments of passion and total overwhelming affection — and his words only stoke the fires within her. The sensations within her begin to spiral out and expand, begin to fill her body until she feels like she can hardly contain anything within her body, like her skin’s too small, like she’s glowing, and then it becomes to much and it explodes, whitehot light burning in her body and behind her eyes as she cries out.

He’s kissing her shoulder when she comes to, leaning against her but no longer holding her down, wrapping his arms around her waist and holding her to him.

“You’re amazing,” he says against her ear, pressing a kiss there. “Filthy and morally bankrupt, but amazing.”

“Oi,” she breathes, feeling pleasantly exhausted as she turns around in his arms to smile at him, “that’s a bit rude.”

He smiles and kisses her, softly and sweetly, his hands skimming her sides, worshipful touches and full, soft lips. When he pulls away, he kisses her nose. “How about that dinner?”

“Mm,” River says, extricating herself from him, entwining one of her hands with his and pulling him slightly to the side. “But the professor you’re filling in for has his own office. And I’m sure you have the keys, so I’d quite like to continue with dessert.”

“You’re terrible.”

“You’re even worse.”

“Well-suited, then.”

“Is that a yes to the office?”

“That’s a yes to anything and everything you want.”

She reminds him of this moment whenever he tells her no, and the memory is enough to make him blush, if not to get her way.

 


End file.
